To be honest, that's more of a general issue with "competitive" play. People have far too great a tendency to abuse whatever gives them an edge like there's no tomorow. And setting the limits on these things right is difficult. I don't think there's a single game (or sport) that doesn't suffer from it that isn't at least a 100 years old and has had the time to develop (and even those occasional run into issues where certain playstyles become completly dominant...)
Do you think GW listens to people on forums like ours when making new models/rules? I’ve seen a lot of great ideas here that I would love them to consider like Woogity’s Kroxigors and cold ones, or rules changes that accurately reflect the lore.
And there is also the problem whether to balance more for fun and by that for the more casual crowd, and then balance for the competitive scene. It's also hard to balance synergies between units. One of the only objectively fair games I know of is Chess.
And even then ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-move_advantage_in_chess For further reading check out handicaps in Go.
By the Gods they should do this. It’s far more enjoyable when you encourage narrative play over powergaming, but it’s powergamers who then whine the most when it does happen
Eh, debatable. Not everyone plays narrative games. for pick up games, it ruins the fun for the casual players more than the powergamers when something is broken, because when those casual players that aren't bringing a "hard" list run into the harder lists and get tabled in 3 turns while hardly killing anything, it's generally not a fun experience for them, and with all the power lists being easily found on the internet and net-listed, they become more popular faster.
AoS lore? AoS narrative play? Aeeeeggghhhhh As much as I like AoS I really have a severe distaste for the lore. While I don’t mind powerful characters when everything is over the top it becomes less and less enjoyable, especially if it is not well written. In AoS it is everywhere, and the lack of reality makes me nauseous (I’m the kind of nerd who rationalizes what I see) and I find it to much to accept.
Are you shurten your in the right place this iz warhammer we are talking about we kind of set the bar for over the top
Imho you should balance for fun and ignore the competitive scene 99% of the time. If you balance around fun then competitive balance will eventually follow, after all getting crushed by some OP nonsense isn't much fun. On the other hand if you balance around competitive you're liable to get mechanics that might be balanced but not fun to deal with as well as all sort of other nonsense (eternal arms-race, mechanics that are only balanced for certain levels of skill but utterly broken on lower levels, not to mention the fact that the competitive scene tends to attract the more overcompensating elitist jerks who'l want to feel special and who'l give absolutly terrible suggestions on occasion). If you want some great examples of what goes wrong when you focus too much on competitive try looking at e-sports, or videogames in general. The more they focus on competitive, or hardcore gameplay, the more of a mess the game tends to become and the more questionable decisions you start seeing. My favorite example of this is LoL, there's several things balancingwise that they do that's utterly deranged. For starters they love their statistics and will use those statistics to dismiss a lot of critique, which leads to fun situations like certain characters being utterly broken in low levels of play, but since they become more useless the higher you get their statistics eventually average out to a more normal level so they are "balanced". Or their briljant view on how "fun" matters more than "anti-fun", which essentially means that they think it's okay for you to randomly die out of nowhere as long as the attacker had to do something complicated for it and feels like he did a genius move. Also, it's currently unknown if chess is balanced, it hasn't been solved yet. Though the current consensus is player one has an advantage .
I'm going to guess the generals handbook nerfs Seraphon. Changing the allegiance ability from the teleport. As you know, if you're not a new army and you win a GT, you may encourage others to not buy the new models and need to be nerfed.
Sorry, I should have made this more clear - I didn’t mean narrative games as in the Narrative Play AoS format, I meant points games where players bring armies that are more thematic narratively rather than the most killy lists, so more like what you describe as casual gamers. Pretty much this - focus on making the game fun first and foremost, and encourage players to bring more thematic armies in above anything else. If the powergamers whine, then tough. It’s people like them that give the hobby a bad name.
The first player advantage is minor enough that most humans won't ever really notice is. So yeah it does a decent job There's several other games as well. Things like yatzee are completly balanced (admittadly you also don't actually interact) and something like poker probably does decently as well (provided the shuffling and dealing is done completly fairly). I think there's some asian boardgames that do quite well as well, but I'm not too certain which ones it was. There's also some games like monopoly where there's a distinct advantage to going first, but also some distinct disadvantages (you reach everything first, but you'l also spend all your money first buying stuff if you get too eager..)
I doubt that, there isn't a whole lot to nerf, and we're already very much a one-trick poney. Nerfing our teleporting or summoning in any meaningfull way takes away our one functional tool and can't really be done without either damning the army or requiring extensive buffs to make up for it.